Monthly Archives: November 2015

Here’s a collection of tips to help you feel good while traveling, arrive feeling fresh and ready to explore. At the same time, it will help you eliminate or at least reduce jet lag. It’s all worth trying.

This list of recommendations was compiled and offered to her clients by Julie Wilholt, a personal trainer at the Bay Club at the Howard Hughes Center.

Drink Up

Cabin air is drier than the Sahara. Before you hop on the plane, drink water and buy water for the flight. To combat dehydration (and the fatigue it causes), drink two 8-ounce glasses before boarding, then another one each hour in flight.

Keep yourself feeling hydrated throughout the flight. The cabin crew will always be happy to provide you with a glass of water or juice, and there’s even an onboard water fountain on selected flights.

Flying is extremely dehydrating, which means the eight glasses of H2O a day rule really won’t cut it. Add an extra 6-8 ounces for every hour in the air. Limit your consumption of alcohol and coffee. Even decaf can leave you parched, so stick with bottled water, herbal teas or seltzers.

Eat Light

In flight, avoid alcohol and salty foods.

As tempting as the onboard meals are, it’s best to avoid eating too much in one go as it can leave you feeling bloated.

Want to be bright-eyed when you arrive? Moderate your intake of carbohydrates (breads, pastas, fruits and veggies); they induce sleep. Eat more high-protein, low-fat fare (poached eggs, low-fat dairy products, grilled fish) to boost alertness. Reverse these strategies if you plan to sleep after you land.

Keep On Moving

Walk the length of the plane every hour or two to keep your back happy, your muscles supple, and your blood circulating.

The best way to stay comfy and minimize the risk of clotting disorders like Deep Vein Thrombosis (DVT) at key is to keep moving. So try to change your sitting position regularly, and avoid crossing your legs.

Walk in the clouds.

Take the end of a movie as your cue to leave your seat and go for a stroll around the cabin, as well as getting your circulation moving.

Walk during an airport layover.

Avoid Deep Vein Thrombosis (DVT)

You may have heard of DVT and a possible link with flying. DVT is a condition where blood clots form (usually) in the legs, during long periods of sitting still (so traveling in a car or train, or sitting at a desk carry the same risk as flying). The danger comes if the clot breaks free and travels to the heart or lungs.

Just Say No (to sleeping pills)

Tempting as it may be, especially if you’re a nervous flyer, don’t take a sleeping tablet on your flight. It will reduce the chance of you moving about during the flight, which isn’t good news for your circulation, and you’ll feel much groggier when you arrive.

The only exception is if your doctor is aware that you are flying and has expressly recommended that you take a sleeping tablet.

If you need to catch some shut-eye, take a nap but limit it to 45 minutes. NASA research has shown that this amount of time will improve alertness. Longer haps leave you groggy when you wake up.

Take Care Of Your Ears

Cabin pressure changes can be painful if you’re flying with a heavy cold, sinusitis or ear problems, so we advise against traveling with these conditions if possible.

If you experience problems during the flight, suck a sweet or hold your nostrils and gently blow through your nose—this should equalize the pressure. If it doesn’t do the trick, have a chat with a member of cabin crew for some more advice.

Moisturize

Keep your skin pampered and protected from the dry air onboard by regularly applying moisturizer and lip balm. If you wear contact lenses, it’s a good idea to bring your glasses with you, as your eyes might feel drier than usual.

The best thing you can do to adjust to a new time zone is to expose yourself to natural light as soon as possible. Jet lag is the result of your body’s circadian rhythms being out of whack. Light acts as a powerful cue, telling your internal clock where you are and what schedule to keep.

Book a daytime arrival, especially if you are on a west-to-east flight. Once you are there, drag yourself outside and do something active in the daylight. You can recover from jet lag much more quickly.

Fitness On The Road

To preserve your hard-earned fitness level, exercise at least every third day while on the road, performing at least a third of your aerobic routine at your typical level of intensity and completing your strength training program at least once a week, using the same amount of resistance. Keeping at least part of your routine in tact will keep your energy level up.

Hide The Hotel Clock

Knowing that it’s 3 a.m. and you have to get up at 6 a.m. guarantees that you won’t sleep for the remaining three hours.

Eating While Traveling

When eating out on the road, try ordering without looking at the menu. Arrive at the restaurant with a healthy meal in mind, like steamed vegetables or broiled chicken, and just order it.

After accepting the position of EVP of the Electric League of Southern California, I moved from Phoenix to Los Angeles in late August of 1968. I told you how that came about in my blog on 8/21/13.

We rented a house on the border of San Marino (upscale Waspish community) and Pasadena (more eclectic). It was a big old Spanish manse with floor heaters. We got a beagle dog named Arrow who delighted in chewing through the telephone wires outside so we had a few interruptions of service.

It wasn’t too far from the office so the commute was tolerable and it worked out to be a good one-year transition for the family’s move to Southern California.

I inherited an office in the City of Commerce, 3-1/2 employees and a beat up leased Buick with somewhat bald tires. My assistant was Dick Pharoh, who was very pissed he didn’t get my job. There was also Sharon and Bonnie, who seemed to have mixed-up jobs. Then there was Jim, a bookkeeper, who literally wore a green eye shade and worked three days a week creating numerous ledgers which he totaled and sent the totals to Alfred Norris, a CPA, who produced reports on his computer; a somewhat odd and redundant process.

If you asked Jim a question about some financial transaction, he would come in with two or three ledgers and take 20 minutes to show you the trail but you never quite understood what the bottom line answer was.

To pursue our mission of increasing electric usage in the exciting home market, we ran extensive incentive programs which awarded points to appliance salesmen during four or five promotions each year. The points were redeemable from a large catalogue of prizes or for travel.

In addition, we ran group trips during some of the promotions to Las Vegas, the Bahamas, La Costa, etc.

One dark cloud hanging over my arrival was that no one knew the extent of the liabilities for all the points that had been issued and not yet redeemed and for which we were responsible.

A second cloud was no one had a clue as to the effectiveness of all these incentives to salespeople. Did the points motivate salespeople to push electric appliances or were the salespeople just responding to the customer’s choices? My inclination was to think it would be more effective to create promotions to motivate the consumers.

The two major utility companies—Southern California Edison (SCE) and the L.A. Department of Water and Power—were the main financial support of our programs. Appliance distributors and manufacturers kicked in and some 500 plus appliance dealers paid small amounts for each promotion.

I was also concerned about the lack of membership and programs in the commercial side of the electric industry; i.e., commercial lighting and electric heating.

So first, I reorganized the office. I made Bonnie my secretary and had her forward all the bookkeeping data to the CPA to produce computer reports. I put Sharon in charge of all the promotion data and bid adieu to the green shade bookkeeper Jim and the disappointed Dick Pharoh.

After a year on the job, I approached my main supporter at SCE and asked him if he would chair a long-range planning committee. He said, “No, you draft a plan and the EXCOM can review it.”

“Okay,” I said and over the next several months I drafted “Forward By Plan.” It incorporated my thoughts on changing the direction of the appliance promotions to appeal to consumers and broaden the membership and programs for the commercial side of the industry.

About the same time all this was happening at the office, we bought a four-bedroom house in La Habra, a quiet suburb on the Los Angeles/Orange County line. I always seemed to be on the lines between communities. The house had a redwood fence, which Arrow loved to chew on trying to escape.

Every so often he did escape. He would come back and sit on the front lawn. If you approached him, he would take off again. Trying to catch him was a joint family exercise.

With few changes, the EXCOM and the board approved the five-year strategic plan. We changed the name to the Electric Industries Association (EIA), and we were off and running.

I hired Anne Ewing to be Director of Consumer Affairs and Bob Leiban to head up the Commercial Division expansion. I gambled that the unredeemable points liability would be very low. Mostly, I hoped the points would get lost or misplaced. I got lucky and the costs were minimal.

In the appliance arena, we held yearly kickoff events at Busch Gardens (great place, but no more), the Queen Mary (where the sound system didn’t work), on Channel 11 TV (early morning) and at The Castaway in Burbank.

Our promotions included “Waltz Through Washday,” our award-winning “Freeze Your Food Costs,” and several others for color TVs and refrigerators.

One day early on I got a call from Tom Tobin, who had a similar position to mine and was my competitor working for the Southern California Gas Company. It was a short conversation until the room and I both started shaking. I said, “Tom, I think I’m having a heart attack over this call.” He said, “No, you idiot, we’re having an earthquake.” My first earthquake in La-La Land.

Next month we’ll recount our success and what we did to face the dark specter of an energy crisis.

The uber left continues to pound the drum about inequality and wealth. Unfortunately, raising the minimum wage and/or increasing taxes on millionaires by 4% or 5% maybe worthwhile, but it will do nothing, zero, to ameliorate the disparity of income and wealth.

At the same time, it’s very interesting that these pundits do nothing to address the enormous compensation paid to athletes and entertainment folks.

All of which says to me that, yes, there is inequality but the basic problem is we have a distortion and an imbalance in our “value system.” I believe this distortion will have far more harmful effects on our way of life then the disparity imbedded in “inequality.”

Let’s explore some of what I mean:

Highest paid Hollywood actors in 2013

Matt Damon = $18 million for his movies

Brad Pitt = $20 million

Tom Cruise = $22 million

Liam Neesen = $32 million

Ben Stiller = $34 million

Tom Hanks = $35 million

Will Smith = $36 million

Adam Sandler = $40 million

Johnny Depp = $50 million

Robert Downey, Jr. = $75 million

Leonardo DiCaprio = $77 million

And that’s all in just one year! Interesting – no women in the top earners!

Highest paid sports stars

Floyd Mayweather, boxing = $105 million

Cristiano Ronaldo, soccer = $80 million

LeBron James, basketball = $72.3 million

Lionel Messi, soccer = $64.7 million

Kobe Bryant, basketball = $61.5 million

Tiger Woods, golf = $61.2 million

Roger Federer, tennis = $56.2 million

Phil Mickelson, golf = $53.2 million

Rafael Nadal, tennis = $44.5 million

Matt Ryan, football = $43.8 million

Manny Pacquiao, boxing = $41.8 million

Mahendra Singh Dboni, cricket = $30 million

Dale Earnhardt, Jr., racing = $25.9 million

Usain Bolt, track = $23.2 million

Derek Jeter, baseball = $24.3 million

Serena Williams, tennis = $22 million

Not bad for playing games. When you look a bit further at baseball, for example, bench players are making $3 to $5 million hoping to get chance to play.

And retired athletes don’t do too bad either. Michael Jordan made $90 million in 2013 and Arnold Palmer had to settle for only $40 million.

I would venture to guess that there are a lot more sports and entertainment celebrities making multi-million more than corporate CEO’s. The disparity advocates like to show the ratios of CEO’s to workers. How about comparing the enormous compensation of golf stars to the groundskeepers, the chauffeurs and the entourage hangers on? Look at these actors we’ve cited and compare their pay to the camera operators, the script readers and all the gophers who wait on them hand and foot.

I’d wager none of these people work as hard or have any more skills than corporate CEO’s.

The distortion of the value system was a major cause of the decline of the Roman Empire. You think we’re headed in the same direction?

I think the major piece of inequality has occurred and the most telling, in the lower end of our middle class citizenry. This is the inequality I’m most concerned about:

Nearly 40% of Americans eligible to work are not—the highest percentage of non-workers since 1977.

Median income in America, which means half of us make more and half make less, now stands at about $54,000 a year. That is 3% lower than it was when Barack Obama was elected president in 2008.

On the president’s watch, median household income has declined by about $1,600. White households make just over $60,000 a year, Hispanics $42,500 and Blacks $35,400.

That to me is the most significant part of the inequality dilemma we should be most concerned about.

Try to keep this all in perspective as we hear more and more rhetoric about inequality on the political campaign trail.